Pat Waiters
Wulf, Melvin L.
The New Debate The Negro Mood, by Lerone Bennett, Jr. Johnson Publishing Company. 104 pp. $3.95. My Face Is Black, by C. Eric Lincoln. Beacon Press. 137 pp. $3.50. SNCC: The New Abolitionists, by...
...National economic planning, public not private profit, national health insurance, broadened unemployment benefits, more ungrudging welfare care, and an educational explosion are the most important requirements to forestall the inevitable consequences of an expanding technology...
...SNCC: The New Abolitionists, by Howard Zinn...
...SNCC has served notice to the worst of American society that its tenure is about to expire and, beyond race, has also served notice that a nation which supported racism for so long must itself be radically changed...
...The real issue is how to secure justice for Negroes today...
...But neither are they the Negro's best friend, because their vision is impaired by the competing demands of the white establishment which they will not desert...
...He seems unable to decide whether those white representatives are merely influential or actually in control, but in either case he is convinced that they "have served as a brake rather than an accelerator of the Freedom Movement...
...At the same time, the national Administration must stamp out the official and unofficial racist violence in the deep South, insure the right to vote, and enthusiastically enforce the whole Civil Rights Act...
...Given the total neglect of the Negro in the national design for one hundred years, this is a considerable achievement...
...His final chapters, "The Meaning of Malcolm X" and "Black Chauvinism," explain for the white man the chilling alternative to the eradication of racial oppression...
...If it declines to take the strongest measures and sticks to expediency, its "Great Society" will remain just another slogan...
...He is not much more enamored of the old Negro leadership...
...Lerone Bennett, editor of Ebony magazine, and C. Eric Lincoln, a sociologist, both Negroes, describe in The Negro Mood and My Face Is Black the present Negro temper—resentment plus growing rage—and the determination of all Negro citizens to enter American society without qualification...
...The temporizers within the liberal community who assay the situation "realistically" are not, of course, the Negro's worst enemy...
...Bennett reserves his special outrage for the white liberal, "a man of shadows, a friend of freedom who pauses, calculates, hesitates...
...4.95...
...The objective is not entry into the middie class, but reconstruction of America's dominant values...
...As for the strongholds of the Confederacy in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, the Administration can choose to conciliate or command...
...That honor belongs to those who openly oppose Negro progress...
...Howard Zinn's exciting narration of the legendary work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, Alabama, and southwest Georgia (SNCC: The New Abolitionists), confirms the prospects described by Bennett and Lincoln...
...that the Negro now understands he need not accommodate injustice for the sake of the white man's customs and sensibilities...
...More and more that is the strategy around the movement...
...Unarmed revolution, however, is what Zinn's book is all about...
...Lincoln has the same message, seemingly more measured but no less explicit...
...The theme is rejection of white-liberal values in favor of radical values...
...Armed revolution, he says in a passage presumably written before the summer of 1964, does not seem unreasonable to the Negro in the present tense situation...
...If the government acts irresolutely, not even its most generous sentiments about racial equality will be able to neutralize the enemies of freedom who wait impatiently for the brilliance of non-violent action to evaporate in economic despair...
...The common lesson these books teach is simple—that Negroes will no longer suffer the white man's talent for compromise and moderation...
...Though many of its activities and goals remain unacceptable to a large number of white citizens, surveys indicate the majority of them are not prepared to accept the alternative of white supremacy as national policy...
...Reviewed by Melvin L. Wulf The most important debate within and around the civil rights movement concerns the closely related issues of its militancy and political direction...
...it is less and less the strategy within the movement...
...What strategy and tactics within and around the movement are obviously about is how to avoid offending the white man...
...The time for radical politics has clearly arrived...
...Bennett concludes by sketching the beginnings of a new radical establishment revolving around the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Negro American Labor Council, and their allies: radicals, pacifists, intellectuals, rebels, and non-conformists...
...246 pp...
...The problem of the establishment is apparently not confined to whites...
...He scorns labor and religious leaders who with rare exception preach brotherhood but dare not make an issue of racism in their ranks...
...In a brilliant essay, Bennett analyzes the separate Negro power structure and its white representatives...
...Though they are not a combination of forces which has ever known success in American politics, Bennett analogizes the present condition to 1776 and 1789: "When a game or historical process reaches that point, as French Conservatives and American Tories discovered, Establishment men who refuse to bet lose all the time...
...The energy generated by the youthful activists in the movement may well have ignited not only America's racial conscience, but its economic conscience as well...
...The movement is now a national institution which has penetrated every section of the country...
...We are obviously not going to resolve the Negro-white conflict without radical adjustments in the economy...
...But if white citizens believe that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act the worst is over, these three books make it clear that they are in for a surprise...
Vol. 29 • January 1965 • No. 1
